About the role

⚠️ Please read first

This is a full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco (Presidio) - we work from the office 5 days a week.
You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting.
We require US work authorisation , but are open to O-1 visa sponsorship for truly exceptional candidates.

Senior Full Stack Engineer (Back-End)

What You'll Do

You’ll write and ship full-stack features end to end, from the agent runtime and backend APIs, to the web and desktop UI that users interact with every day.

We're still ~15 people and shipping to our first paying users. You won't just be building features, you'll be making the decisions that determine whether this system holds at 1000x the current load.

You'll work directly with our CTO. Here are a few examples of the kinds of things you might work on:

Build and operate the sandbox infrastructure where agents execute code, process isolation, resource limits, secure credential handling across thousands of concurrent sessions.
Design the deployment and migration pipeline for a Cloudflare Workers + Fly.io architecture, including blue-green rollouts and canary patterns.
Instrument real-time workloads end to end: SSE streaming, task queues, and multi-model LLM provider routing.
Ship new backend capabilities, tool integrations, scheduled task execution, memory indexing, and see them used by real people the same week.
Reduce operational toil for a small team: structured logging, tracing, monitoring, and incident response tooling that actually works at our scale.
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Stack

TypeScript, Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, Hono, Drizzle ORM, Postgres, Zod, SST, Vercel AI SDK, Docker, React, Vite

Who You Are

Minimum

You have 5+ years of engineering experience building and operating backend systems in production. You've been on-call.
You're fluent in TypeScript and comfortable working across the stack, but your instinct is to go deeper on the backend.
You've built real-time systems: WebSockets, SSE, event streaming, or message queues in production.
You have distributed systems intuition, you understand consistency tradeoffs and have opinions about them.
You've shipped infrastructure to real users, not just internal tooling.

Bonus (but not required)

You've worked with Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, or serverless compute at the edge.
You've built agent systems, model routing layers, or tool-use architectures with LLMs.
You've been a founder or early-stage engineer and care deeply about product.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $180K–$240K + meaningful early-stage equity + health, dental, 401(k).

The Process

We keep our process simple. Exceptional candidates go from first touch to offer within 2 weeks.

Application: Submit your resume and answer a few short questions.
15-minute intro call: Quick check to align on location, motivation, and logistics. If it's a go, we move fast from here.
45-minute technical interview: You'll work through a real backend problem. We're looking for fluency, depth, and how you think about systems.
System design interview: A deep dive into how you architect systems. We'll walk through a real Wordware problem together.
Final conversation: We answer your questions and scope out the work trial.
Work trial: Paid trial to work on a real project in person with us, usually a few days to two weeks (flexible to do what works for you). See how we work and whether this feels like the right fit on both sides.

About Wordware

AI Agents have arrived. They are powerful enough to read, plan, and act across your everyday life and work. The question is no longer whether they can run canned demos to check the weather, it’s whether real teams can rely on them for critical work. We optimize for adoption over spectacle: useful, accountable systems that help top professional complete real tasks.

About Wordware. Wordware is backed by Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator, with a $30M seed round. Our beautiful, historic San Francisco office sits in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, it’s full of plants and radiates innovation and calm. We genuinely love working together. At lunch we talk about alignment and AI consciousness, we have surfboards in the office ready to use, we take walking meetings on the beach and hang out after work at the bar or climbing wall. We work really hard because we care deeply about what we do.

About Sauna. Sauna is Wordware’s AI workspace for professionals. Think ‘Cursor for Knowledge Work’ and you’re halfway there. With explicit permission, it connects to tools like Gmail, Calendar, Slack, and thousands more, to gather the right context to move your work forward. It learns who you are, drafts and refines your documents, presentations, and datasets, researches across the web and your org’s internal knowledge, summarizes long threads to cut through the noise, proposes next steps, even acts on your behalf when enabled. You can work with Sauna live, side-by-side, or schedule jobs to run automatically in the background, with clear permissions and easy off-switches. Sauna brings the power of AI Agents to all professionals.

Startups are intense, but the intensity is intentional here. We work in focused sessions, cool down, and go again. You’ll have real ownership, clear outcomes, and the satisfaction of seeing your work land with customers, not months from now, but this week. If you’re joining Wordware, you’re choosing impact over spectacle. You’ll shape the product, the standards, and the way we work together. It’s demanding but humane: we write things down, respect time off, and prefer steady progress to late-night heroics.

Who thrives here? People who like small, correct moves that compound. People who stay calm when the plan changes and make the next good decision without drama. People who treat constraints as design inputs, not roadblocks. If you’ve built something from scratch, carried it through the unglamorous parts, and kept your standards high, you’ll feel at home.

We’re not optimizing for résumé lines; we’re optimizing for judgment. You don’t need to be loud. You do need to be reliable, curious, and willing to own outcomes.

We judge by what you build, not when you build it. Weekends are for life. Burnout doesn’t make good software. We’re aiming for something durable and generational, and that requires knowing when to push and when to recharge. If that balance and this mission resonate, we should talk.

Don't see your role? If what we’re building clicks for you and you’re exceptional, tell us. We’ll consider shaping a role around the right person.

How to stand out? Show us signal. Build something with Sauna, send a short note on what worked and what didn’t, or point out a concrete way to improve the product. Clarity beats volume. Initiative beats polish.

If you’re truly excellent, a LinkedIn link is enough—ping it to brigid@worware.ai.